decreased to 2% in the first half of 2009, according to the NPD Group. From January to September 2009 in the U.S., Microsoft only held 2% sales share, compared to Apple's 73%, SanDisk's 9%, and 3% for Sony's Walkman line. Availability outside the U.S. Microsoft released the Zune to Canadian consumers on June 13, 2008, marking the first time it was available outside the U.S. Microsoft has even made efforts to ban visitors outside the United States from Zune Originals. Users wishing to sign up for a Zune Tag could easily circumvent most problems by signing up for a US-based account. The Zune 2.0–3.* firmware does not support non-romanized fonts other than Cyrillic. East Asian characters used in Chinese and Japanese, for example, show up on the Zune device as mojibake instead of characters. Users have improvised ways to downgrade the firmware on the Zune device to older version that support Asian characters (V1 Zunes can be hacked to display Asian font). This is, however, not recommended by anyone. Legacy In 2012, Slate ran a reader poll inviting them to select a piece of defunct technology worthy of a reappraisal, where the Zune beat out Myspace, the PalmPilot, feature phones ("dumbphones") and older versions of Internet Explorer. Farhad Manjoo, the site's technology columnist, went to considerable lengths to acquire a Zune HD. "[It] wasn't as complete a failure as you may believe," he wrote. "If you purchased one over the iPod Touch back in 2009, you wouldn't have regretted it." Had Microsoft brought the first Zune to market at the same time as the iPod, or even the Zune HD at the time of the iPod Touch, it might have been a serious competitor to those players. Manjoo wrote: "By that point, iPod had become the world's de facto digital entertainment device," he recalled. "To beat it, Microsoft needed to offer something that would make Apple's device look pitifully old-fashioned. The Zune HD didn't do that. Its design marked it as being different from an iPod, but that was pretty much the only difference. There was no reason to buy the Zune unless you wanted to stand apart from the Apple cult. And there was a cost to standing apart from Apple: Because of its popularity, there were millions of apps and accessories for the iPod. As good as it was, the Zune HD couldn’t match Apple’s sheer market power."